Ricerc@Sapienza

In a protocol for automatic contact tracing, devices in a distributed environment (e.g., smartphones) exchange information that enables to keep track of each person's recent contacts in an automatic and transparent manner. According to epidemiologists, the latter is an effective manner to slow down the spread of a virus during an epidemic (such as the on-going COVID-19 pandemic), as whenever a person tests positive to the virus it is possible to notify and immediately quarantine all of its recent contacts.

A crucial property of automatic contact tracing protocols is their resilience to attacks trying to pollute the collected information in such a way that it becomes useless. Another essential feature is the fact that such protocols should not be abused by authorities or third parties in order to violate the privacy of citizens.

The project SPECTRA will lay the foundations of *secure* and *privacy-preserving* protocols for automatic contact tracing. In particular, we will:

- Characterize the security properties of such protocols in a precise manner, which covers all known and future attacks, and analyze current proposals in this respect.
- Put forward new efficient protocols with strong security and privacy guarantees under as minimal as possible assumptions.
- Investigate new algorithms based on adversarial machine learning and process mining for exploiting the collected data effectively even in the presence of malicious inputs, as well as decentralized learning techniques (i.e., federated learning) to preserve users' privacy.
- Develop a prototype implementation that builds on already developed and widespread infrastructures (such as distributed ledger technologies).

SPECTRA is framed within an EU initiative for the development of a common toolbox for Member States, which sets out the various relevant parameters to enable a coordinated development and use of officially recognized contact tracing applications.